1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to methods and apparatuses for providing a clean accounting close for a real time billing system.
More specifically, the invention relates in certain embodiments to methods and apparatuses for preventing transactions that occur after the end of a billing period but before billing has been completed from being included in bills generated by a real time billing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Real time event rating and billing systems offer important advantages over traditional billing systems. In a traditional billing system, transaction events are time stamped and entered into a database. In order to determine an account balance at a certain point in time it is necessary to search the database and retrieve all of the transaction events that occurred within the time period of interest and compute the account balance based on the transaction events found. A disadvantage of such a system is that real time balances are not kept, that is, a search and calculations are required to determine current balances at any point in time. No running balance total is stored in memory.
Real time event rating and billing systems, on the other hand, keep a running total of balances. It may be useful to have such a running total readily available in memory for several reasons. For example, it may be desirable to authorize transactions in real time based on account balance or apply a rate to a transaction in real time as a function of certain existing balances. Generally, a real time rating system is useful whenever real time account balances are needed.
In most billing systems, bills are generated periodically. Typically, bills are generated for a specific period defined by an opening time and a closing time. It is generally desirable that the close of the billing period be precisely determined and that transaction events outside of the period be excluded from the billing. Generating a clean accounting close is relatively simple for a non-real time system. The definition of the search criteria provides a time cut off that retrieves only transaction events that occur before the close of a billing period. Generating a clean accounting close for a real time event rating and billing system which is continuously adjusting account balances as transaction events occur, on the other hand, presents a more difficult problem. The billing process is not instantaneous and generally takes a finite amount of time to run that in many applications is at least a couple of hours. During that time, if a transaction event occurs, then it may change an account balance before that balance is billed. The transaction would then be improperly recorded since it occurred after the close of the accounting period.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for methods and apparatuses for providing a clean accounting close for a real time transaction processing system that keeps running balance totals for accounts and does not generate balances using time delimited search criteria.